Playboy of the eastern world

The first modern novel celebrates its 1,000th birthday

IT CONTAINS no military adventures nor epic journeys. Yet “The Tale of Genji” is in every way Japan's equivalent of Homer's “Iliad”. First mentioned in a diary exactly 1,000 years ago, in late 1008, it has over the centuries been subject to changes, adaptations, mutations and translations (not to mention being remade as a manga comic), all of which have helped it not just survive, but flourish. Today this account of the amorous escapades of an aristocratic aesthete is widely regarded as the first modern or psychological novel.

The book's success lies in its broad appeal. Right-wing Japanese commentators point to “The Tale of Genji” and take great pride in emphasising how much more sophisticated civilisation was in Japan in the 11th century compared with Europe at that time. For middle-aged Japanese, reading the book at study groups in adult-education centres is as popular, and as quintessentially Japanese, as flower-arranging or the tea ceremony. Feminists rejoice that the author, Murasaki Shikibu, was a woman, even if writing fiction was generally regarded as frivolous and lowbrow; not an activity for men.

The book's 1,000th anniversary is being celebrated in Japan with lectures, symposia, plays, conferences and concerts. A line of Genji tea and Genji sweets is already on the market and the CD of a newly composed Genji symphony goes on sale this month.

Ruthlessly summarised, the book's storyline goes like this. The “dazzlingly lovely” Genji, son of the emperor and one of his lower-grade consorts, is irresistible to women. He enjoys a string of affairs as a young man, even abducting a ten-year-old girl so he can mould her into the perfect life-companion. But sleeping with the daughter of the leader of the opposing political faction is one indiscretion too many and Genji is forced into exile. Recalled eventually to the capital, he builds himself a mansion with a different woman in each of its four wings. Honours are heaped upon him and he is offered the retired emperor's daughter as a wife. But Genji's royal bride betrays him with another man and when his beloved mistress dies after a long illness, our heartbroken hero follows her swiftly to the grave.

At this point the reader is only two-thirds of the way through the book, which runs to 1,200 pages in its most recent English translation and boasts a cast of more than 400. The story resumes with new heroes. Two young men (the purported son and grandson of Genji) are wooing a trio of sisters. One of them succumbs to marriage, but of the other two sisters, one starves herself to death and the other chooses to become a nun rather than fall into male hands. Love, it turns out, is not innocent hanky-panky, but something noxious, corrosive—even deadly.

Sheer scale is not all that is forbidding about the book. Japanese prose was still in its infancy in Murasaki's day, so her syntax can be opaque. Sentences lack subjects, direct speech is often unattributed and, most alarmingly, the characters change names according to their rank or circumstances. Genji, for instance, is variously referred to as the captain, the consultant, the commander, the grand counsellor, the palace minister, the chancellor and the honorary retired emperor.

The subject matter is also challenging. There is polygamy, bisexuality (when one young woman rebuffs his advances, Genji consoles himself with her younger brother who turns out to be “no bad substitute for his ungracious sister”) and something very close to incest. Genji is attracted to Fujitsubo, one of his father's consorts, because of her resemblance to his dead mother. Even though she is, in effect, his stepmother, he fathers a child with her.

Murasaki's language was already archaic and impenetrable a century after it was written, so the Japanese have been reading annotated, abridged, simplified and illustrated versions of the book since as early as the 12th century. The same holds true today. In the last century, four Japanese writers produced a total of seven updated versions of the book. The most recent of these was by Jakucho Setouchi, a female novelist whose own work deals with issues of women's independence. Setouchi's “Genji” has sold more than 3m copies since it was published in December 1996, a success that Kodansha, the publisher, attributes to the author's empathy with the women in the tale and her colloquial writing. Canny marketing also played a part, with Kodansha organising lectures and discussion groups all over the country at the time of the launch.

Freer and less reverential adaptations exist as well. Also from Kodansha is Waki Yamato's “Fleeting Dreams”, a “sugar and spice and all things nice” take on Genji in manga form that has sold 17m copies. For those who prefer a less saccharine approach, Shogakukan, a rival publisher, came up with another manga version that emphasises the malicious female characters and includes plenty of explicit sex.

It took until the 20th century before a complete English-language version appeared. Arthur Waley, a Cambridge classicist who taught himself Japanese and Chinese, produced the first English translation in six instalments between 1925 and 1933. Waley was much more interested in readability than fidelity. He sped up the plot, cut long descriptive scenes and the occasional entire chapter. He clarified many of the sentences, added psychological background to the characters and westernised the Japanese architecture. The result was a prose masterpiece, though one which modern scholars prefer to call an adaptation rather than a translation.

Lytton Strachey, a neighbour of Waley's, considered his translation “beautiful in bits”, but the reaction from Japan was much warmer. Even if Waley's Japanese noblemen sound a little like early-20th-century Cambridge undergraduates, one contemporary Japanese writer famously declared that the Englishman had breathed life into a work that had been tottering around like a headless corpse. Indeed, Waley's stature in Japan is such that Heibonsha, another publisher, recently released a retranslation of Waley's “Genji” back into Japanese. “Even in the modern-language versions of ‘Genji', the majority of Japanese readers don't make it much past the opening chapters,” explains Takao Hoshina, an editor at Heibonsha. “Waley's is the most accessible version for us too.”

In 1976 Edward Seidensticker, an academic already celebrated for his translations of Yasunari Kawabata, a Nobel prize-winning novelist, brought out a new version. Torn between admiration for Waley's narrative verve and horror at the liberties he had taken with the text, Seidensticker produced a “Genji” that was doggedly faithful but a little lacking in grace.

It was left to Royall Tyler, whose charming and urbane “Genji” came out in 2001, to chart the course between the exuberance and the exactitude of his two predecessors. Perhaps because he lives in the Australian bush, Mr Tyler was willing to recognise that readers can lose their way in the novel's vastness and so provides a handy kit of orientation tools: chapter-by-chapter lists of the characters and footnotes to explain the imagery of the poems dotted throughout the text.

“The Tale of Genji” rewards perseverance, but just as young Genji flits from one mistress to the next, so the reader can choose between the three English versions of the story. Effervescent Waley, prim Seidensticker or suave Tyler—who will you take to bed with you tonight?